Encouraged by the fulsome adulation which grew up under the Tudor dynasty, and free from dread of personal danger, James henceforth governed Scotland “with the pen,” as he said, through the Privy Council. This method of ruling the ancient kingdom endured till the Union of 1707, and was fraught with many dangers. The king was no longer in touch with his subjects. His best action was the establishment of a small force of mounted constabulary which did more to put down the eternal homicides, robberies, and family feuds than all the sermons could achieve.
The persons most notable in the Privy Council were Seton (later Lord Dunfermline), Hume, created Earl of Dunbar, and the king’s advocate, Thomas Hamilton, later Earl of Haddington. Bishops, with Spottiswoode, the historian, Archbishop of Glasgow, sat in the Privy Council, and their progressive elevation, as hateful to the nobles as to the Kirk, was among the causes of the civil war under Charles I. By craft and by illegal measures James continued to depress the Kirk. A General Assembly, proclaimed by James for July 1604 in Aberdeen, was prorogued; again, unconstitutionally, it was prorogued in July 1605. Nineteen ministers, disobeying a royal order, appeared and constituted the Assembly. Joined by ten others, they kept open the right of way. James insisted that the Council should prosecute them: they, by fixing a new date for an Assembly, without royal consent; and James, by letting years pass without an Assembly, broke the charter of the Kirk of 1592.
The preachers, when summoned to the trial, declined the jurisdiction. This was violently construed as treason, and a jury, threatened by the legal officers with secular, and by the preachers with future spiritual punishment, by a small majority condemned some of the ministers (January 1606). This roused the wrath of all classes. James wished for more prosecutions; the Council, in terror, prevailed on him to desist. He continued to grant no Assemblies till 1608, and would not allow “caveats” (limiting the powers of Bishops) to be enforced. He summoned (1606) the two Melvilles, Andrew and his nephew James, to London, where Andrew bullied in his own violent style, and was, quite illegally, first imprisoned and then banished to France.
In December 1606 a convention of preachers was persuaded to allow the appointment of “constant Moderators” to keep the presbyteries in order; and then James recognised the convention as a General Assembly. Suspected ministers were confined to their parishes or locked up in Blackness Castle. In 1608 a General Assembly was permitted the pleasure of excommunicating Huntly. In 1610 an Assembly established Episcopacy, and no excommunications not ratified by the Bishop were allowed: the only comfort of the godly was the violent persecution of Catholics, who were nosed out by the “constant Moderators,” excommunicated if they refused to conform, confiscated, and banished.
James could succeed in these measures, but his plan for uniting the two kingdoms into one, Great Britain, though supported by the wisdom and eloquence of Bacon, was frustrated by the jealousies of both peoples. Persons born after James’s accession (the post nati) were, however, admitted to equal privileges in either kingdom (1608). In 1610 James had two of his bishops, and Spottiswoode, consecrated by three English bishops, but he did not yet venture to interfere with the forms of Presbyterian public worship.
In 1610 James established two Courts of High Commission (in 1615 united in one Court) to try offences in morals and religion. The Archbishops presided, laity and clergy formed the body of the Court, and it was regarded as vexatious and tyrannical. The same terms, to be sure, would now be applied to the interference of preachers and presbyteries with private life and opinion. By 1612 the king had established Episcopacy, which, for one reason or another, became equally hateful to the nobles, the gentry, and the populace. James’s motives were motives of police. Long experience had taught him the inconveniences of presbyterial government as it then existed in Scotland.
To a Church organised in the presbyterian manner, as it has been practised since 1689, James had, originally at least, no objection. But the combination of “presbyterian Hildebrandism” with factions of the turbulent noblesse; the alliance of the Power of the Keys with the sword and lance, was inconsistent with the freedom of the State and of the individual. “The absolutism of James,” says Professor Hume Brown, “was forced upon him in large degree by the excessive claims of the Presbyterian clergy.”
Meanwhile the thievish Border clans, especially the Armstrongs, were assailed by hangings and banishments, and Ulster was planted by Scottish settlers, willing or reluctant, attracted by promise of lands, or planted out, that they might not give trouble on the Border.
Persecution of Catholics was violent, and in spring 1615 Father Ogilvie was hanged after very cruel treatment directed by Archbishop Spottiswoode. In this year the two ecclesiastical Courts of High Commission were fused into one, and an Assembly was coerced into passing what James called “Hotch-potch resolutions” about changes in public worship. James wanted greater changes, but deferred them till he visited Scotland in 1617, when he was attended by the luckless figure of Laud, who went to a funeral—in a surplice! James had many personal bickerings with preachers, but his five main points, “The Articles of Perth” (of these the most detested were: (1) Communicants must kneel, not sit, at the Communion; (4) Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost must be observed; and (5) Confirmation must be introduced), were accepted by an Assembly in 1618. They could not be enforced, but were sanctioned by Parliament in 1621. The day was called Black Saturday, and omens were drawn by both parties from a thunderstorm which occurred at the time of the ratification of the Articles of Perth by Parliament in Edinburgh (August 4, 1621).
By enforcing these Articles James passed the limit of his subjects’ endurance. In their opinion, as in Knox’s, to kneel at the celebration of the Holy Communion was an act of idolatry, was “Baal worship,” and no pressure could compel them to kneel. The three great festivals of the Christian Church, whether Roman, Genevan, or Lutheran, had no certain warrant in Holy Scripture, but were rather repugnant to the Word of God. The king did not live to see the bloodshed and misery caused by his reckless assault on the liberties and consciences of his subjects; he died on March 27, 1625, just before the Easter season in which it was intended to enforce his decrees.